Some exercise advice please?!
Question: i have brought a treadmill as i am sooooo unfit, not overweight just unfit, i have started using it just gently to begin with but my question is , i have asthma and i have found my asthma getting worse not better since i started, will it get better as i get fitter , any one got any advice it will be most appreciated.
Answers: i have brought a treadmill as i am sooooo unfit, not overweight just unfit, i have started using it just gently to begin with but my question is , i have asthma and i have found my asthma getting worse not better since i started, will it get better as i get fitter , any one got any advice it will be most appreciated.
I know that what Iam going to say you already know, but It may help others who are not so well informed.
Exercise is just one of many things which show that the air passages are irritable in asthma.
If you have asthma, your air passages are irritable. This means things which are harmless to other people may trigger an attack of asthma. So you might get asthma from:
Cold air, if you move from warm indoor air to cold air outdoors.
Tobacco smoke
Emotional stress. Although there seems to be no really good research on this, people with asthma often say their asthma gets worse if they are upset.
Infections of the lining of the breathing passages, such as colds and 'flu.
Some drugs, especially medicines called beta blockers used for high blood pressure or heart disease.
Laughing. So don't laugh! (Only joking, but it can happen.)
Irritants in asthma inhalers. Strange, but true. Some powder inhalers can cause a small amount of chest tightness. Pressurised aerosol inhalers need to have a lubricant and this can cause worsening of air passage narrowing, occasionally bad enough to be noticeable.
Breathing tests. Just as the faster breathing in exercise can bring on attacks, the faster and deeper breathing you have to do for most breathing tests can bring on quite a noticeable worsening of airway narrowing in a few people.
Sulphur dioxide used as a preservative in soft drinks and wine. This can cause chest tightening within seconds of drinking, or even breathing the air above such a drink.
Indigestion, with stomach acid coming up into your gullet. This is called gastro-oesophageal reflux.
To some extent people differ in which of these things cause the most asthma.
Nevertheless, they all reflect the irritability of the air passages in asthma, even if some of them do so in somewhat different ways.
So exercise is just one of many things which can provoke narrowing of the air passages in asthma. It is just one of many things which reveal the abnormal irritability or 'twitchiness' of the air tubes which is an important feature of asthma. The medical term for this 'twitchiness' is 'hyperreactivity'
The timing of the exercise is important. It takes about six minutes of exercising to bring on exercise-induced asthma, and exercising for quite a bit less than this may not do it.
For a few hours after you have had exercise induced asthma, repeating the same amount of exercise will no longer produce the same amount of asthma symptoms, or may produce none at all.
So you may be able to 'run through' your exercise induced asthma either by warming up with short bursts of exercise, or by continuous exercise which does not bring on a severe attack. Sports and exercises which consist of short bursts of activity with periods of rest in between can be particularly suitable for people with asthma. Examples include relay races, and team sports in which you are not running all the time.
There is also persuasive evidence that gradual athletic training can make you less prone to exercise-induced asthma/asthma in general. At a special school for children with asthma near Oslo in Norway, children ended up being able to do far larger amounts of exercise than they could tolerate before a physical training programme. Although some of this improvement may well have been due to the excellent medical care they received, the doctor in charge thought that the exercise training itself played a vital part in the improvement.
In fact better treatment with medicines can have a powerful effect on exercise-induced asthma. The better your asthma control, the less you will be troubled by exercise-induced asthma.
Exercise-induced asthma is an excellent example of a problem which you can begin to solve once you understand it better.
If you ask yourself the question should I exercise because I have asthma?
Definitely not. In fact enjoyable exercise is even more important for someone with asthma than for other people.
Swimming is a good exercise, this is because you are in a warm moist eviroment, though the chlorine could be a problem.
Reliever inhalers can be tremendously helpful if you use them just before you exercise. This applies especially to the so-called 'beta-2 stimulants' such as salbutamol (albuterol). This drug relaxes the smooth muscle in the lungs and opens airways to improve breathing. It is used to treat asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema and to prevent exercise-related asthmaor, terbutaline. Terbutaline is used to relieve and prevent attacks of asthma, including exercise-induced asthma. The benefit of using these two drugs should last for hours. AS with all drugs there could be side effects
Long-acting reliever inhalers are also very helpful; they just work for longer.
Hope this helps you? As you get fitter there should be a marked improvment in your asthma
it will get better jst excercise gently while you build your fitness up
Any excercise will be hard on your asthma, but in theory, at least, the increased lung capacity and stamina you get from excersise should help with your asthma in the long run. Obviously, don't over-do it, but gentle excersise should ALWAYS help. In theory, anyway.
Good Luck